Prepress
Ex Libris Announces the Release of Primo Version 2.0
Monday 12. May 2008 - Version 2.0 continues to meet user expectations for a quick, easy, effective, and engaging discovery and delivery experience
Ex Libris Group today announced the general release of version 2.0 of the Companys Primo discovery and delivery solution. The result of close collaboration with the Primo customer community, version 2.0 offers enhanced searching capabilities, including the ability to search in very large collections; improved usability and accessibility of the user interface; and easier system configuration and customization.
This release addresses several key areas:
Language support: A range of European and Asian interface languages have been added to enhance the user experience for the growing number of Primo customers in Europe and Asia.
Searching: Version 2.0 provides improved exact-title searching; additional linguistic algorithms and dictionaries; optimized ranking of grouped (FRBRized) records; the identification of frequently misspelled words; enhancements to the “did you mean” mechanism, which “learns” search phrases based on past user queries; and the presentation of results ordered by popularity.
Customization: A choice of user interface layouts is available.
Services: The addition of services such as the sending of item information to users by cell-phone text messages complements the discovery process and enhances the user experience.
Scale: Primo 2.0 can harvest and index very large collections.
Software development kit (SDK): In adherence to the Ex Libris open platform strategy, Primo now includes an application programming interface (API) for 50 services. This API facilitates the customization of Primo and enables customers to develop code extensions that can be shared with other members of the Primo community.
“Deep Search”: A new component enables Primo to leverage the search engines of other repositories and to display results retrieved from these repositories along with local results. Furthermore, the results obtained through the Deep Search component are ranked by relevance and displayed using faceted categorization.
“We are pleased to be part of the first group of Ex Libris customers to implement Primo version 2.0,” comments Robert Gerrity, director of library systems for Boston College Libraries. “The fact that we are able to develop our own unique applications using Primo development tools and to share these with other Primo users makes this product exciting to us.”
Version 2.0 functionalities have strategic significance for our users,” explains Gilad Gal, Ex Libris Primo product manager. “The emphasis we have placed on scalability has enabled institutions with extremely large collectionssuch as the British Libraryto make the Primo solution a focal point in their software environment. The Royal Library of Denmark, a Primo development partner, is already using the Deep Search architecture to present items found in the Digital Article Database Service (DADS) repository of 65 million articles, housed in the Technical Information Center of Denmark (DTIC). These items are presented alongside items collected from the librarys local system, indexed in Primo.”
“Ex Libris customers have expressed their interest in developing open-source components as add-ons for the Primo platform and sharing them within the community,” Gal adds, “and we enthusiastically support these initiatives.”